December 2017

It has been an extraordinary year of exploration and discovery at Lamont. This article, tracing the work of Lamont Associate Research Professor Kevin Uno and his colleagues, is among a collection of stories describing our 2017 research from our annual report.

Lamont Associate Research Professor Kevin Uno and his colleagues are examining the isotopic signatures of buried biomarkers and fossil teeth in eastern Africa from the past several tens of millions of years, searching for signatures of past climate change on the evolution of vegetation and the diets of the region’s mammals, including the ancestors of modern humans. The team’s early findings give us new information about the genesis of human life and raise fascinating new questions.

Tightly consolidated sediments along a portion of the Cascadia Subduction Zone contribute to locking of the fault along the plate boundary for long intervals, major earthquakes, and the potential for a large tsunami.

Concurrent with the announcement that human carbon emissions reached a new peak this year, Galen McKinley, a professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, was interviewed about the difficulties of tracking the sources and destinations of carbon dioxide.

Lamont seismologist Lynn Sykes has been working for more than 50 years to halt the testing of nuclear weapons. His work, along with that of others, has demonstrated that clandestine underground tests can be detected and measured with seismic waves.